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Manetti's Latin treatise Adversus Iudaeos et Gentes (Against the Jews and Gentiles) offers a polemical defense of the Christian religion. This volume, which includes the first four books,surveys human history from the Creation to the life,teaching, and resurrection of Christ. Book I begins with the creation and fall of man in the Biblical account. There follows a long digression adversus gentes (the Gentiles, i.e., pagans), which reviews central points of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and religion, and censures the ancients for their senseless doctrines and bloody rites. Manetti then returns to the Jews, whose beliefs and practices are praised from Abraham to Moses. During their centuries of "true" piety, Manetti calls the chosen people "Hebrews." But from the time of the Exodus onwards, he censures them as "Jews" because they observe the absurd and cruel practices of Pentateuchal legislation, which he views as analogous to pagan rites. Manetti stresses several themes in Jewish history: the early development of the concept of righteousness, the Exodus, the Mosaic Law and its inadequacy--thus providing a "preparation for the Gospel" in Eusebius' sense. The next three books provide a synoptic biography of Jesus in three stages. Book II describes the life of Christ up to the raising of Lazarus; Book III relates his teaching, and Book IV offers an account of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection.--

"René Descartes's Regulae ad directionem ingenii ('Rules for the Direction of the Understanding') is his earliest surviving philosophical treatise, and in many respects his most puzzling text. It is a profoundly original work with few intellectual precursors, and offers the fullest account anywhere in Descartes's work of his theory of method. Yet Descartes left it unfinished, and unpublished, at his death in 1650. The versions currently known to modern readers are all posthumous: a manuscript copied for Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, a Dutch translation of 1684, and the version printed in 1701 in Amsterdam. As a result, the details and date of its composition, its fragmentary, unfinished state, and its philosophical content have long puzzled scholars. The discovery by Richard Serjeantson in 2011 of a previously unknown, early manuscript draft of the Regulae in Cambridge University Library was a hugely significant event in Cartesian scholarship. This edition presents the Cambridge manuscript of the Regulae alongside the 1701 Amsterdam version of the text to allow comparison between the early manuscript draft and the version best-known to modern readers, together with a full English translations of both texts. It is also the first critical edition of the Regulae to take into account the full range of textual witnesses to the text, both manuscript and printed. The new Cambridge manuscript sheds important light on the composition, date, and philosophical content of the Regulae, and will provoke scholars to rethink key questions about Descartes's early philosophical development